Why should I use Amiga?

[anon123]

I am a hobby programmer with experience in Linux. I'm interested in alternative O/S's and Amiga caught my eye. I figure if the user-base is so dedicated, there must be something to it. From both a user and developer point of view, what makes Amiga (modern, MorphOS, AROS, OS4 etc.) so good?

[anon123]

I was considering AROS, what would you recommend I use? How does the Amiga forever thing compare (I perfer Free (as in freedom))?

From a programmers perspective, how is Amiga? Is the API clean? easy to use? powerful?

[anon123]

What about Linux?

I'm used to doing A LOT of work in a CLI, does Amiga have a powerful CLI (better than the Windoze CLI, with support for pipe's and stuff like that)?

What does Amiga have that Unix doesnt?

Is there a central repo or directory of some sort for Amiga software?

Are there ports of my favorite programs, Emacs, Epic4, Lynx?

I saw some screenshots of Amiga's new skin's and up-and-coming icons... it looks AMAZING!

http://mama.indstate.edu/users/nova/arosshow/damir_int1.jpg
http://arosshow.blogspot.com/2007/04/damir-d980-sijakovic-interview-hello.html

[anon123]

'autodocs' sound like 'man' (manual) files from Unix, which are the bees nees! I was looking into hardware for OS4. My understanding is that it runs on PPC's, however, I can't find any other than Mac's, and Mac's have their hardware really closely integrated w/ their OS The only one i found was pegasos (http://www.pegasosppc.com/) , and im not sure it's what im looking for :-?  :-?  :-?  :-?

I'm confused, how is OS4 licensed? :-?  :-?  :-?  :-?

To clarify, pipes give the ability to pass the output of one shell command to the input of another. e.g.
ls | grep amiga
the output of 'ls' is piped (>>> | <<<) to the input of 'grep' which sorts the output based on it's content, in this case, the string 'amiga'.

I might try AROS, but i dont want to be unfair to Amiga and use an incomplete OS to make my judgement.

You say it is designed for 1 user, I assume it has multiuser support?   :-o   :-o   :-o   :-o   :-o   :-o   :-o   :-o   :-o   :-o

Thanks for the prompt responses  :-)  :-)

[anon123]

'If you want multiuser support you'll have to write it yourself using shell scripts.'
Could you elaborate? Is that possible? I'll see if AROS is multiuser, if not, then I'll just add it (yay for open-source!).

I would appear that piping does the same thing, just in a slightly different fashion, am I correct? It looks like pipes in amiga are like file descriptors, which are maintained, unlike in Unix, where you simply pass the stream once, without naming it. That's great! :-)

Could I build my own amiga compatible hardware from parts?  :-)  :-)  :-)  :-)  :-) Where can I find the spec's that genisi (or someone) made?

[anon123]

So amiga DOES have multiuser support, it just isn't fully used?

I meant build a box for OS4, which I think runs on PPC, or does it have a really special set up or something? Could someone explain the hardware aspect of modern amiga's to me, it's really bizarre  :-?

I'll look into Amiga forever. When do you expect the SAM440EP to be ready?

What is AmigaDOS? Is it the shell? The underlying system/kernel? A separate OS?

[anon123]

"It would be fairly trivial for them to write the necessary drivers/bootstrap code for those machines."
Would this require the code or deep knowledge of the machine to write? What exactly is missing? Drivers? Bootloader? Why hasn't somebody (3rd party) written it? Why can't I write it?

[anon123]

You say some "claim" to have done it privately, have any of these people released their code? Is their a doc somewhere explaining in depth how the Amiga boot sequence works? Could someone point me in that direction, I would like to attempt this (running Amiga on a pegasos or a mac).

What hardware can I run 3.9 on?